Product Management

📚 "High Output Management"

There's a moment, usually a few months into a management role, where you realise the job isn't what you thought it was. Andy Grove's High Output Management is probably the clearest framework for what the job actually is. The most honest one, at least. The core argument is that a manager's output is the output of their team plus the output of the people they influence. Not the tasks you complete. Not how many meetings you run. The output is what other people ship because of how you work, honestly, and that's a different thing to optimise for. This deck covers the full framework. Managerial leverage and why it's the only metric worth taking seriously. Task-relevant maturity and how it should change the way you manage different people. The production process model Grove uses to think about teams as systems. One-on-ones, staff meetings and decision meetings and why each one serves a different function. There's also a section on management by objectives, performance reviews, feedback and what Grove calls the biggest failure mode for new managers: continuing to act like an individual contributor when the job has changed around you. The material is dense in places. Grove doesn't simplify things that aren't simple, which I think is the right call even if some sections require a second read. If you're a first-time manager trying to figure out what the role actually demands or a senior leader stress-testing how you think about leverage and systems, this is worth working through. Topics covered: managerial leverage, production process model, task-relevant maturity, management by objectives, one-on-ones, performance management, decision-making meetings and team output. The job isn't doing the work. It's making the work possible at scale, which takes longer to internalise than it sounds.

📚 "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport

Most people who feel like they can't stop checking their phone frame it as a willpower problem. Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism argues the framing is wrong from the start and that changes what you actually need to do about it. This deck covers the full framework. The 30-day digital declutter and why gradual reduction fails where a clean break works. The attention economy and how social media platforms are engineered to modify behaviour rather than serve you. The craftsman approach to tool selection, where the real question isn't whether a tool offers any benefit but whether it offers enough to justify what it costs you. Each section is built as a question and answer. Why solitude deprivation weakens your capacity for clear thinking. What frequent context-switching does to deep work. The difference between connection and conversation and why that gap matters more than most people expect. The material is dense. It doesn't flatten Newport's ideas into productivity tips, which I think is the right call even if it makes some sections slower to move through. If you're trying to reclaim focus or understand the system competing for your attention, this is a useful place to start. Topics covered: digital minimalism philosophy, the attention economy, the 30-day digital declutter, deep work and focus, solitude and reflection, intentional technology use, high-quality leisure and behavioural design for habit change. Digital minimalism isn't about using less tech, or at least that's not the useful frame. It's about deciding whether any of it deserves your attention in the first place.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Most self-help advice is about technique. Covey starts somewhere else entirely. The argument is that personality ethic — the shortcuts, the scripts, the personal branding — produces results that don't last. What actually works is character: a set of principles so internalised they stop feeling like discipline and start feeling like identity. That's a harder thing to teach. This deck tries anyway. 43 cards covering the full architecture of the framework. The Maturity Continuum and why interdependence requires independence first — not as a motivational point, but as a structural one. The Time Management Matrix with enough specificity to be useful: what Q2 actually contains, why Q1 dominance is a symptom not a workload problem, and why urgency feels productive while quietly preventing everything important. Win-Win gets more than a definition. The conditions required for it, the organisational systems that undermine it, and why most people default to Win-Lose without realising it. The emotional bank account is here. So is the two-creations concept, empathic listening versus attentive listening, and the non-obvious risks in skipping Habits 2 and 3. Synergy gets its own section — including the thing teams consistently get wrong, which is settling for compromise (1+1=1.5) when the actual target is creative collaboration (1+1=3). The final habit is renewal. Covey's counterintuitive claim is that rest and recovery increase output. The deck treats it as a productivity argument, not a wellness one. For product managers, founders and leaders who've read the book once and want the ideas to actually stick.

📚 "The Let Them Theory"

Most people come to Let Them through Mel Robbins. Relationship advice. Someone you care about is making a choice you wouldn't make. The model says: let them. That insight works in relationships. It works even better inside organisations. I've been building out a version that treats it as a management operating model. The strategic logic: when you release the urge to control what other people do, you stop distorting the data your system produces. You get cleaner information. Problems start surfacing at their actual scale rather than the scale your anxiety assigns them. The decisions get sharper from there. The framework has two sides. Let Them covers other people's domain: how they respond to your decisions, what they do with their time and attention, whether they adopt or resist or quietly leave. Let Me covers yours: the standards you hold, the system you design, the consequences you actually follow through on. Most management problems I've seen up close come from leaders trying to run both sides at once. Three different companies, same pattern every time: the team stops solving things without being asked. No one can quite explain when that started happening. The deck covers the full model: boundary-setting as system architecture rather than personal preference, the signal-to-noise case for not intervening before the pattern is clear, how to distinguish deliberate testing from indefinite tolerance and what over-control actually costs. Some of those costs are visible. Some accumulate quietly. There's a section on Conway's Law that I didn't plan to include at the start, but the connection turned out to be one of the more interesting parts to think through. The way a controlling management style tends to produce a tightly coupled product architecture, because teams build what they're allowed to build rather than what they're capable of. (The escalation trap section also got long. I kept it all in.) The second half goes into the applied stuff. How to diagnose whether a failure is a people problem, a process problem or a strategy problem. Why moving too fast collapses the distinction. The escalation ownership trap, where every problem you solve trains the system to escalate more. High-performer edge cases, which is where the theory gets genuinely complicated. Stakeholder resistance and how Let Me works when someone is just pushing back on a call you've already made. Built for product managers, engineering managers, CPOs, team leads. Anyone running a system that involves other people making decisions.

📚 "The Mom Test"

Most customer interviews feel productive. They're not. Someone nods, says "that sounds interesting," and you walk away thinking you've validated something. Rob Fitzpatrick has a name for that. The Mom Test is the book that explains why founders keep building the wrong thing with total certainty. Short enough to read in an afternoon. Hard enough to actually apply that most people don't. This deck is 30 cards covering every idea in the book that actually matters in the room. The three rules. How to separate a fact from a polite opinion. Why bad interviews manufacture false confidence in ideas that haven't earned it yet, rather than just missing the signal. Commitment signals get ranked weakest to strongest. (Because "I'd probably use something like that" is nearly worthless, and most people forget this the moment a warm conversation ends.) Anti-patterns get their own section: the compliment sandwich, premature convergence, talking to the right job title but the wrong person in that role. These are the traps that survive a first reading of the book. Cards are tagged by theme. Principles, tactics, anti-patterns, signals. For product managers, founders and UX researchers who've run bad discovery and would prefer fewer of those.

Senior PM -> Lead PM

Most Senior PMs don't struggle with the product work when they step into a Lead role. They struggle with everything else. Managing PMs who are better than them at certain things. Running hiring processes with no playbook. Setting up operating rhythms that don't require them to be in every room. Figuring out what kind of leader they want to be before the job forces the decision. This deck covers that transition: people leadership, PM hiring and development, product operating models, OKRs, cross-functional leadership at scale, and product culture. For Senior PMs preparing for a Lead interview, recently promoted Lead PMs who want to build real foundations rather than improvise, or anyone managing a team of PMs for the first time.

Mid to Senior Product Manager

Senior PMs operate differently. Most people treat it as a seniority thing, something that happens with time but the gap shows up well before the title conversation. You've hit every target. Shipped on time. Run a clean process. And then someone more senior walks into the room and reframes the whole problem in two sentences and suddenly the roadmap you've been executing looks like a list of tasks with no point of view attached. That's the gap tenure doesn't close. This deck is about what actually changes. Setting strategy rather than receiving it. Managing value risk, not just delivery risk — which sounds like a small distinction until you've shipped a technically perfect feature nobody wanted and had to explain it in a quarterly review. Influencing teams you have no authority over, which is most of the job at senior level and almost none of the preparation for it. The topics get into platform thinking, unit economics, how to read org design as a product signal, innovation portfolios (which most product orgs have opinions on and almost none manage deliberately). Strategic sequencing. And the one that takes longest: developing other PMs, which requires a different relationship to your own expertise than most people are ready for. For PMs who want to understand what senior actually requires. Not the title. The work underneath it.

Junior to Mid Product Manager

Most PMs learn to build. Fewer learn to ask whether they should. The shift is harder than it sounds. You've spent years getting good at execution — writing specs, unblocking engineers, shipping on time. And then someone asks you why you built that feature, and the honest answer is: because it was on the roadmap. And the roadmap came from someone else's decision, and you didn't push on it, and now it's live and nobody's using it. That's the moment the transition starts. This deck is about what changes when you stop waiting to be handed the right problem and start doing the work of finding it yourself. Prioritisation under uncertainty, which looks like a process problem but is mostly a judgment problem. Stakeholder communication, which most PMs treat as a reporting task (a bit of the classic "update the slide, send the email, move on") when it's actually one of the main ways you build or burn trust with the people who decide what you get to work on next. Running experiments without kidding yourself. Owning a metric instead of a feature list, which is a different kind of accountability and takes some adjustment. And the writing. PRDs that actually make decisions rather than document them. Decision memos where you've done the thinking so the reader doesn't have to. I'm still working on some of this, honestly. The metrics ownership thing especially. But the PMs who made the jump in a way that stuck all seemed to have one thing in common: they stopped asking "how do I build this well?" before they'd answered the question underneath it. Built for PMs heading into mid-level, or into interviews where someone's going to probe exactly this.

Playbook for getting 20-40% more comp | Jacob Warwick

Jacob Warwick is a behind-the-scenes professional negotiator who has helped clients secure over $1 billion in additional compensation. In this episode he goes deep on the psychology and tactics of comp negotiation — covering why you should never negotiate over email, how to flip interviews into discovery conversations, why anchoring early kills your ceiling, and how to make yourself so valuable in the hiring process that breaking salary bands becomes the natural outcome.

Junior Product Manager